Tag: mothers

At the bottom of this post you will find a recipe from Honey and Co for the most wonderful White Chocolate and Tahini Cake. I recommend you make it and then sit down with a slice to read a bit about being yourself.

Implicit in coming into the world as a human being is the physical connection with Mum. If you’re lucky there is also a profound emotional connection. As time goes by Dad comes into the picture too if he is available. Little Bloggins learns who s/he is by looking at Mum and Dad and working out what they like, what brings a smile to their faces and what brings on scowls and angry words. In an ideal world we want to please our parents and they like to show their pleasure in us.

However! Anyone who has been near a two-year-old or a sixteen year-old will know that there are two periods in our lives when we ‘just want to be me’. The two-year-old has just learned to say ‘no’ and sometimes can’t be persuaded to say anything else. The teenager (at some point or other) will act out the ‘no’ loud and clear and sometimes by not speaking at all. This is normal behaviour. Not pretty but normal.

If you are parenting one of these age groups let me congratulate you if you have an obstreperous toddler or a sulky teenager – it means you have done a grand job! You have children who attached safely to you and now feel safe enough in that relationship to separate as they need to, to be themselves. Because they love you so much they have to make themselves pretty unpleasant and difficult to do that. Don’t worry. Underneath is the child you love and who still loves and needs you. S/he will emerge.

One of the ways in which those separating children may act out is with regard to food. Haven’t we all had a teenager, resident or visiting, who has a special diet? That is a way of making you notice s/he is not the same little one who complied with your food offerings. It is a way of individuating and, notice, it often disappears into the background later in life. Toddlers, of course, do not spare our feelings or our upholstery but spit out stuff they seemed to eat willingly only last week.

You can see how, if things go awry with this tricky separating process, people can get stuck in this rejecting stage, metaphorically spitting their life out as a matter of course. It’s a wearing way to relate with the world and one that often brings people to therapy. Sometimes the ‘problem’ is with food. Sometimes it is with people or other things. The curious thing is that where this behaviour becomes embedded the child remains unable to ‘just be me’. They remain attached albeit in a negative way, unable to ‘leave home’. Of course the other thing can happen too. The eating becomes compulsive and unhealthy and, ironically, this often happens where the parents eat this way already even if they put a lot of effort into their children’s healthy eating. It may represent a refusal to separate. Whichever way of not separating occurs there is generally a lot of anger with it. The energy to separate is like rocket fuel but where it is thwarted (maybe mother is too insecure and touchy? too overwhelming?) it turns to rage. What makes working through these issues delicate is that these behaviours are deeply rooted in love and loyalty to the parents. People fear that they will lose that by separating whereas the opposite is actually true. We need to individuate to appreciate the people our parents are or were, to have compassion for their difficulties and for ourselves.

So what does healthy separation look like and when does it happen? The good news is, it is never too late. For some people it doesn’t happen until long after their parents are dead. Finding out you can ‘just be me’ without rejecting anyone or anything is the most wonderful liberation. You can explore yourself for the first time rather than defining yourself by rejecting the world around you. Likewise finding out you don’t need to hold on to Mum any more (or how she wanted you to be) is a huge gift. Separation is about growth, the way a flower pops out of its bud casing. It’s not rejecting anything. It’s not grabbing anything. It’s just being itself.

And as parents seeing the beauty of our children just being themselves is much more rewarding than trying to hold onto them or an idea of how we thought they were going to be.

For the icing and the filling I have developed my own mixture which is simpler to make and gives a much stiffer spread than the original recipe (which included Mascarpone, cream cheese and double cream and had less icing sugar).

I use 500g mascarpone and 180g icing sugar (and 1 tbsp vanilla and 1 tbsp rum as per the original recipe).

For the decoration : 30g white chocolate finely chopped and the zest from another two lemons.

Heat oven to 170C fan (190C /gas mark 5).

Mix all the dry ingredients together in a large bowl.

In a smaller bowl mix the eggs with the oil, tahini, vanilla and buttermilk, then combine the two mixes, before slowly adding the boiling water.

Mix until everything is well incorporated.

Line the base of two 9in cake tins with a round of baking paper. Divide the mix evenly between the two tins, place both in the centre of the oven and bake for 20 minutes. Rotate for an even bake and return to the oven for a further 10-15 minutes. The cakes should feel lovely and bouncy and have a good golden colour all over.

Remove from the oven and carefully flip the cakes to flatten the tops. Allow to cool upside down.

Make the icing by mixing all the ingredients together with a small whisk until well combined and thickened. If you are using an electric mixer, use a paddle to avoid overworking the mix and splitting it. Place the first cake on a serving platter, top with half the icing, spread around and top with the second cake. Add the rest of the icing on top, spread and, if you wish, sprinkle with chopped white chocolate and lemon zest. If serving on the same day, it is best to avoid placing the cake in the fridge. If you are keeping it for longer do place it in the fridge, but allow it to come to room temperature before serving.

Splitting is a recipe for mental health that we learn before we can speak. It is a normal healthy strategy the human psyche employs before reason arrives. We imagine there’s a good mother that comes and feeds us and a bad mother who doesn’t come. We imagine there really are two separate people. The good mother is happy and smiling and loving. The bad mother is Mother on an off day, in a bad mood, grumpy, tired, fed up or maybe when she just needs five minutes to herself! It’s a convenient ‘pre-conscious’ behaviour which enables us to hold conflicting experiences in the same tiny heart and mind before we can ‘understand’ or rationalise what is happening. And before you tell me it wasn’t like this for you because your mother was always there, let me clarify. For an infant lying in its cot and feeling miserable, Mother feels hateful even though she’s just finished feeding you and fallen asleep next to your bed because she’s exhausted.

It is too confusing and produces bad feelings if we ‘think’ bad things about mother. (It is too difficult for many of my adult clients so no wonder the dependent infant has problems.) How will we love her again if we really feel these bad feelings about her? And how will we survive if we don’t love her? We need her.

Let me say this with flashing lights and siren accompaniment : this is about the normal infant with the more than adequate mother. All mothers fail their infants every day and they need to so in order that children can learn to handle anger, disappointment, fear without cracking up (or as we hygienically call it,trauma.)

By the age of about two we are ‘supposed’ to have developed what they call ‘object constancy’ which means you can just about tolerate knowing that wonderful Mother, whom you adore, has off days and is the self-same harridan that handles you roughly and burns the toast and yells or puts on her best dress and goes out for the evening leaving you with a babysitter. Trouble is most of us don’t seem to reach that integration by age two and some of us still don’t get it by age fifty-two. Some of us feel the only safe way forward is to hang on to that ideal mother in our heads and guess what happens to the horrible hateful feelings we’re not dealing with?

You’ve read the title to the post and you’re way ahead of me. Enter the wicked step-mother who is purpose built for all those negative feelings we can’t allow ourselves to feel about Mum. If you’ve ever read a fairytale you can’t help noticing that stepmothers get a bad press. They are murderous, greedy, manipulative and fatally attractive to innocent men. Snow White’s stepmother actually plots to have her killed, Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother sends them out to starve in the forest. These iconic monsters of children’s literature represent a safety valve for kids to hate their mothers in an entirely healthy unconscious way. But hey, if they’ve got a stepmother in their lives they can keep all their good cosy feelings for Mum and channel all those bad, ugly feelings towards That Horrible Lady Who Has Stolen Daddy. And Mum is superhuman if she doesn’t encourage this splitting. Who wants to be the villain? (As a mother and stepmother myself I have some experience of being the Good Cop and and the Bad Cop and I know which is nicer.)

But this naturally occurring splitting also points to an unhealthy split that many societies (yes, and religions) make between the good female (self-sacrificing, sex sanctified by reproduction or abstained from) and the bad female (autonomous, dangerous, sexual and unapologetic). Mixed feelings about sex lie right at the heart of this and the impossible question : how can my saintly, pure mother whom I love also be a powerful sex goddess? Many of us wall up the sex goddess in the garage the minute children arrive because we just don’t know how to combine those roles. The paradox of the Virgin Mother is one we are still wrestling with. Stepmothers embody all those unmotherly female attributes that the world finds just too powerful to feel comfortable with. The wicked stepmother is beautiful but not maidenly. She is sexual and autonomous. She is in touch with her own sexual desire but not as a means to procreation! She is in a mothering role without any of what we euphemistically call ‘mothering instincts’ (for which read ‘biological investment’). Wow! No wonder she’s hot stuff.

This is the first in a series of posts about parenting and step-parenting and in the next one I shall be addressing how as mothers and step-mothers we can cope with the horrible feelings coming up in ourselves and the horrible feelings coming towards us from our step-children. And don’t worry! We will be asking an all-too-unasked question, Where Does Dad Fit In With All This?

Happily this experience is not the same for everyone but I encounter many women for whom this is a really painful area and not much talked about with love. Look out for my next post but meanwhile there is support for stepmothers here and it looks really good.

‘When we arrive in the world after a taxing journey into the unknown, the comfort of another human being awaits each one of us. Warmth, holding, safety, love if we’re lucky, are accompanied by and communicated through food. This is our first act on earth. ‘

This is how my post called ‘Comfort Eating’ began nearly a year ago and I want to revisit this intimate connection between food and how we feel inside because it lies at the heart of our obsession with food. It is implicated in the psychological knots we tie ourselves in about what we eat and what we should look like. If things go well in our earliest days, eating and love and the comfort of contact with another become inextricably bound together in our brains as they grow. This becomes part of what we call reality and however bad your childhood was, if you’re reading this you somehow got enough food to get by and you likely got enough love to get by as well … and maybe more. We are very good at feeling wistful for the love we yearned for and didn’t get. It is often difficult to feel the love we did get because we are angry and sad about what was missing.

Early on babies do not distinguish between love and food and what we learn about love and food we mostly learn unconsciously when we are newborn babies. Small wonder then that when we need love many of us look around for something to put in our mouths. There is no right or wrong here, just observation. This is how being human works. If we can stop punishing ourselves for eating the ‘wrong thing’ or ‘too much’ and just notice how much love we really need, that can help. If we can pledge to provide it for ourselves we take a big step towards forgiving the person who didn’t give us enough.

Promise yourself right now that whatever else you do you will not shame yourself around food and weight. That is a huge step towards bringing love and self-control into the same room. Refusing to shame yourself can liberate you from the tyranny of food : what should I eat, how much, have I ‘earned’ it? We don’t eat because we ‘deserve’ to. We eat because we need to. The more we listen to our bodies with an open mind the easier it is to find out what we need to eat and when.

We are not here on earth very long but long enough to find out how to feed ourselves with kindness. Does that sound like a good plan?

Ultimate Chocolate Brownies (adapted from Gary Rhodes’ recipe)

10 ozs caster sugar

4 eggs

8 ozs unsalted butter

3 ozs cocoa

3 ozs plain flour

8 ozs plain chocolate

4 ozs hazelnuts or pecans, chopped

4 ozs white chocolate in chunks

Whisk eggs and sugar. Melt the butter and add. Then add flour and cocoa. Melt the plain chocolate and add that. Then the nuts and the white chocolate.

Grease a shallow tin and bake at 180 degrees for 25 minutes. Cool before cutting into very small rich cubes. Eat with creme fraiche and raspberries adjusting the ratio of cake to fruit according to your situation.

A few days ago Summer was fondly kissing us goodbye. Today a powerful wind and the threat of rain are thrusting towards me like Autumn with an outstretched hand and I rush down the garden to pick the wild plums or damsons before they are lost. Here they are having a wash in my sink and when they were clean I rustled up some damson jam which is my favourite. There’s no easy way to stone damsons but they are worth it.

Here’s the lovely syrupy mess they become after a short while in a pan with two thirds their own weight in sugar. For me the stones never float to the top so I resort to ladling the jam from one pan to another via a shallow dish where I can scrutinise each spoonful and fish out the stones. With ordinary plums it helps to count the plums first and then you have a target for the number of stone. With damsons I usually have over 400 and invariably lose count at some point.

This ended up in seven lovely pots and in time would all disappear onto people’s toast but good damson jam is such a great treat IMO that I decided it should furnish an old fashioned jam tart for supper.

My mother was a Pastry Queen and I resolutely did not learn to make pastry for the first thirty five years of my life because I wanted to be different from her. In fact I was in a giant sulk or tantrum, truth be told, which I should probably have chucked in when I was about seven but I dug my heels in because I had been hurt and because my will power (or wilfulness as she called it) was second to none. Of course I achieved my purpose of hurting her but I see now I hurt myself much more. Since then there has been reconciliation and forgiveness although much of it only after she died. Death is never an obstacle to forgiveness luckily but if you have an opportunity, dive in and do it sooner.

Anyway … my mother used to make wonderful individual jam tarts, lemon curd tarts, treacle tarts, all in miniature so that they appeared out of the oven in all their colourful loveliness and I didn’t know which to eat first. (My tantrum extended to not making pastry but it didn’t stop me eating hers!)

So here is the recipe for Damson Jam Tart but I guess you could use any really delicious jam and needless to say the finished article is good with Ice-cream, cream, fromage frais or any other unsweetened dairy.

Sadly I am not a pastry queen but I can at last do an acceptable shortcrust. It is heavy on the fat which means it remains very soft and breaks easily when you pick it up to line the tin. But it also means you can just squidge it in in pieces with your fingers and it all sticks together well.

I get my best results with Stork margarine rather than butter but others disagree. So this tart was simply

115 g Stork soft margarine

165 g plain flour

a pinch of salt and enough cold water to bring everything together.

Roll out as far as possible and line a greased loose-bottomed tart tin approx. 15 inches or 40 cms in diameter. Heat the oven to 180 degrees and do actually wait until it is hot! Put a circle of baking parchment inside the raw pastry and up the sides and fill with baking beans (porcelain or just dried beans). Give it 15 minutes in the oven and then remove the paper and beans.

Fill about half way up with really good jam and return to the oven until the jam is bubbling – about 20 minutes or so.